COSMIC CARGO INCOMING.

Byline: Greg Bolt The Register-Guard

The end of what has been a record-setting trip through both time and space will end early Sunday with a pink flash in the night sky, and if the clouds part at just the right moment, Oregonians will have a ringside seat near the finish line.

The Stardust space capsule will return to Earth at 1:57 a.m. and blaze over the Oregon-California border on its way to the Dugway Proving Ground in remote Utah. Inside its white-hot heat shield will be some of the oldest and most precious material ever recovered: bits of comet dust believed to be the leftovers from the creation of the solar system.

"In terms of how did the planets come together and how do solar systems put themselves together, this is a unique sample," said Jim Schombert, an astrophysics professor at the University of Oregon who also played a small role in the development of the Stardust project. "This is reaching back in time much greater than anyone has done before."

The 100-pound Stardust capsule will become the fastest man-made object ever when it streaks through the upper atmosphere at more than 28,000 miles per hour. Looking south, naked-eye viewers with a clear sky should see a pinkish streak or dot lasting about 90 seconds that at its peak will be as bright as Venus.

Those with a telescope might be able to spot it as it crosses in front of the moon followed by a shimmering tail of hot air and debris from its heat shield.

Inside will be a mere 1/1000th of an ounce of space dust, a priceless cargo that scientists have waited six years to see. And it took a spacecraft unlike any other to bring it here.

Schombert was a scientist at NASA headquarters in the mid-1990s when the plans for Stardust were going through the final approval process, and he served on an oversight team that reviewed the science goals and instrumentation for the project. He calls Stardust a huge departure from almost everything that came before it.

"Most of them are kind of launch a camera, take some pictures, get some spectros- copy," he said. "But this one was going to do something really wild, which was actually capture some material from the tail of the comet in a gel and then fold it up inside a re-entry capsule and drop it back to the Earth. Just in terms of the technology, this was really bizarre."

Although Schombert's research focuses on galaxies rather than solar systems, he was excited by the project. Comets, often described as rocky snowballs, are believed to be relics of the early solar system, formed at the same time that the disc of cosmic debris orbiting the newly formed sun began to pack together into what would become the planets.

After following a looping route through the solar system, Stardust dove through the tail of comet Wild 2 (pronounced Vilt), holding out a collector shaped like a tennis racquet. Assuming a safe landing, the returning samples will give scientists their first-ever look at material believed to be more than 4 billion years old.

"This is the classic buzzword you get in science, but they really are the fossils of the early solar system," Schombert said of the cometary debris. "Comets that are bones from those days. So studying material from comets is like a peek back in our past."

Stardust's fiery return will mark the end of the longest journey ever by an object sent into space and brought back, a 2.88 billion-mile trip that included a loop around the sun and two around Venus to build up speed. Two parachutes will slow the capsule before it drops onto the Utah desert.

The landing plan brings uncomfortable memories of the ill-fated Genesis spacecraft, a probe that returned samples of the solar wind only to crash and burst open when its chutes failed to deploy. Schombert said there's little chance of a repeat.

"It's highly unlikely that will be the case for Stardust," he said. "It was a very different design and had much better testing in the initial phases. I actually predict a very spectacular recovery."

At $212 million, Stardust cost less to complete than a blockbuster sci-fi movie. But it really went where no one has gone before.

"There are very few places on the Earth we haven't been to, but the solar system is still wide open," Schombert said. "And maybe we're not going there with people right now, but certainly we're exploring it."

CAPTION(S):

UO astrophysicist Jim Schombert predicts a "spectacular recovery" of the Stardust capsule on early Sunday morning. A s t r o n o m y